Educational Leadership:Teaching the Tweens Abstract

publications

April 2006 | Volume 63 | Number 7

Teaching the Tweens

Which Way, the Middle?

Marge Scherer

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Broadening the World of Early Adolescents

Donna Marie San Antonio

Early adolescence is a time of great turmoil as well as tremendous social, emotional, and cognitive growth. Young people at this age are becoming more aware of social status and of their position in the social hierarchy; at the same time, they are usually moving into larger school environments where they are exposed to more variation among their peers. Thus, it is important that schools provide diverse environments that support the social growth of students in this age group. The author describes her two-year study of 30 economically diverse students who were moving from grade 6 in one-town elementary schools to grade 7 in a multi-town regional middle school. She found that social relationships were of paramount concern to students, and that certain school structures—especially competitive extracurricular activities and ability grouping—tended to heighten social segregation. The article ends with the recommendation that middle schools carefully examine how to balance social development and academic achievement, and the author’s assertion that we cannot have one without the other.

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Differentiating for Tweens

Rick Wormeli

To teach tweens effectively, teachers need to be willing to do whatever it takes to advance student learning at every turn, including providing individualized instruction for students when the regular instruction doesn’t meet their needs. The author, an experienced middle school educator, describes how teachers can promote tweens’ learning by teaching to their developmental needs, treating academic struggle as strength, providing multiple pathways to standards, giving formative feedback, and daring to be unconventional.

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Mayhem in the Middle: Why We Should Shift to K–8

Cheri Pierson Yecke

Several schools that eschewed the middle school model and remained K–8 discovered anecdotally that their students showed fewer behavioral problems and higher academic achievement than many students enrolled in middle schools. On the basis of studies that verified these observations, school district leaders in Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Philadelphia accelerated a shift to the K–8 model. Their feedback on the process and on the K–8 model itself suggests 10 strategies that can help middle schools transition to the K–8 model, such as including parents in the process, adding higher rather than lower grades, ensuring grade-level balance, and making 6th grade serve as a bridge between the elementary and middle school grades.

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Guess Again: Will Changing the Grades Save Middle-Level Education?

James Beane and Richard Lipka

Blaming unsatisfactory student achievement on the middle school concept is a case of mistaken identity. Too many middle schools have failed to fully implement the middle school concept. Based on statements from the Carnegie Council and the National Middle School Association, the middle school concept calls for improved academic achievement for all students, a focus on young adolescence, a challenging and integrative curriculum, a supportive and safe environment, improved teacher preparation for the middle grades, and better relationships with families and communities. Schools that have fully implemented these components have seen positive results. Several large urban districts in the United States, convinced that too many of their middle schools are less than effective, are thinking of returning grades 6–8 to the elementary school. Grade configuration, however, is not the solution to unsatisfactory school performance. The solution lies in creating a challenging curriculum, pushing for structures that support high-quality relationships, finding ways to reach out to families and communities, and addressing the systemic issue of poverty.

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Leading Adolescents to Mastery

Sue Kenkel, Steve Hoelscher and Teri West

When 29 percent of final grades for students at Bendle Middle School showed up as Ds and Es, teachers knew something had to give. Kenkel, Hoelscher, and West describe how the ABCI approach, based on mastery learning, shook up a community culture of low expectations for working class kids, and opened the way for more appropriate teaching methods for at-risk middle-schoolers. Through training and facilitated reflections on their practice guided by Michigan Middle Start, Bendle faculty implemented the key aspect of ABCI: no acceptance of substandard work. For the past three years, students at Bendle have been provided as much time and help as they require to complete every school assignment to a level of C quality or higher or receive an Incomplete. The authors delineate the teaching modifications and accommodations to school structures that came along with adopting the ABCI approach.

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Stories from Tween Classrooms

Bruce Morgan and Deb Odom

The authors of this article, 4th grade and 6th grade teachers at Castle Rock Elementary School in Colorado, describe their efforts to engage their students in learning. Morgan recounts a math lesson in which he confirmed that 4th graders sometimes need extensive preparation and support to translate their impressive insights into the written word. Odom tells how she used cartoons in her classroom, drawing on her 6th graders’ sense of humor to engage them in reading and writing. The authors point out the common thread in their narratives: Although their students differ in maturity, they all need “to be appreciated and accepted, to feel safe, to have fun, to feel that they’re in control, and to feel competent enough to take risks and learn.”

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Resolving the Confidence Crisis

Terri Apter

As children approach adolescence, they often experience confusion and uncertainty as they attempt to appear more grown up than they really feel. Research on both girls and boys has documented that the buoyant self-confidence of younger children often gives way to self-consciousness as young adolescents become aware of the complexity and difficulty of life’s challenges. Educators and parents understand the importance of self-confidence, and sometimes attempt to counteract tweens’ loss of confidence by “supplying a surround-sound of confident language: ‘You are wonderful.’ ‘You are smart.’ ‘You can do anything.’” This kind of praise, however, does not increase young people’s ability to persist with challenging tasks. Instead, adults need to foster tweens’ awareness that their success depends on their own hard work and persistence.

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Help Us Make the 9th Grade Transition

Kathleen Cushman

New 9th graders reflect on the worries they had as middle school students about moving into high school. They also suggest ways of easing the transition and providing support in 9th grade. Teens want teachers to connect middle school students regularly with high school students, give them more responsibility in middle school, and focus on meaningful student-teacher relationships. In 9th grade, students prefer smaller learning environments and point out the value of orientation, student mentors, advisory groups, longer class periods, and the availability of extra help.

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A Writer for Tweens at Heart: A Conversation with Louis Sachar

Kathy Checkley

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The Relevance of Young Adult Literature

B. Joyce Stallworth

Although young adult literature is often recommended as a reading bridge to the classics, Stallworth insists that the genre deserves a prominent place in the middle school canon in its own right. She describes several examples from middle school classrooms of how young adult novels can enhance tweens’ “life literacy” by both helping them develop the reading and writing skills needed for success and giving them a forum for discussing tough life issues. There is controversy, whichh Stallworth addresses, over the tendency for many teen novels to center on such emotionally dark subjects as rape and domestic violence. Stallworth also discusses why some middle school teachers are reluctant to step beyond the tried-and-true classics and incorporate young adult literature into the curriculum.

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Welcome to the House System

Daniel G. Green

Searching for ways to help students feel more connected to one another and to the school community as a whole, a junior high school implemented the social house approach. Social houses divide students into multiple social units, rather than into separate academic entities. Each unit has its own identity and theme. The different groups mix during the day in regular classrooms but divide into their four houses during social and academic competitions, community service activities, and schoolwide leadership meetings. The houses reflect the diversity of the school; students of varying races, ethnicities, ages, and academic abilities interact. Teachers and staff members are assigned to the houses to encourage stronger relationships between adults and students. As a result of the program, the school’s suspension and bullying rates have significantly decreased. Student achievement also improved, as measured by a rise in the school’s Academic Performance Indicator test scores.

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How Tweens View Single-Sex Classes

Frances R. Spielhagen

Spielhagen reports on her interviews with students in Hudson Valley Middle School, a middle school in a rural district in upstate New York that has offered voluntary single-sex classes for three years. The 24 6th, 7th, and 8th graders whom she interviewed had chosen to take all-boy or all-girl academic classes for at least one year. All Hudson Valley students remain in mixed-gender groups for nonacademic classes and lunch. Spielhagen found that younger students were more likely to find being in a single-sex class a positive experience; as students got older, they wanted to be in mixed classes. Boys were more at ease in single-sex groups because they were able to compete with peers; girls said they felt safer speaking up without the fear of boys making fun of them. Among older middle school students, boys were less enthusiastic than girls about continuing single-sex arrangements, asserting that bullying was more of a problem with only boys present. Spielhagen concludes that voluntary single-sex classes in public middle schools can help create a positive, challenging learning climate and provide parents more school choice.

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The Age for Drama

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm

Role-plays and other dramatic activities fulfill tweens’ urge to try out different life roles, to explore the world beyond their own reality, and to learn new areas of competence. Wilhelm’s research into reading and motivation has shown that students value learning that they can see as immediately meaningful. He argues that drama strategies bring meaning and purpose to learning. The article describes how the author used drama to explore the issue of Cambodian refugee resettlement, as portrayed in the novel Children of the River. Such strategies connected the novel to middle schoolers’ realities and the broader world, helped students explore new roles and competencies, and kept previously apathetic kids engaged and working.

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The Battle Over Commercialized Schools

Alex Molnar and David Garcia

For the last 15 years, the Education Policy Studies Laboratory has studied trends in schoolhouse commercialism and has found that this practice is increasingly pervasive and diverse. The manifestations of marketing in public schools include incentive programs, such as Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program; contracts that grant soft drink and junk food marketers exclusive rights to sell their products in schools; the Channel One television network, which supplies schools with television equipment and programming that includes advertising; and corporate curriculums, such as the “nutrition education” materials provided by Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. The commercialism study also found growing resistance to schoolhouse commercialism among schools, states, and community members. For example, some local school districts and states have banned soda and junk food vending machines. As marketers fight back, education leaders will have to decide whether the supposed benefits of commercial “partnerships” outweigh the potential harm to students.

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Meet ASCD's Outstanding Young Educator

Danielle Boykin

W. James Popham

Joanne Rooney

Promoting Adolescents' Prosocial Behavior

Yael Kidron and Steve Fleischman